Mysterious signals from glowing orbs

We got to our lovely Airbnb flat not long after 9 this evening.

The day started with a fire alarm in our hotel at 7:20am, which didn't feel like a great start -- though at least it stopped while we were still sleepily pulling on enough clothes to go outside. And, more importantly, it gave D the chance to check right away if he could book an earlier sailing than Saturday. And he could! This afternoon! So it was nice to have some good news first thing...even if this booking was of course immediately followed by the same automated text he got yesterday about how the sailing could be canceled at short notice because of the weather.

D and I got up for breakfast, I had tasty mushrooms and eggs and was introduced to the tattie scone which immediately enters the small pantheon of potato products I'm actually excited to see (I'm usually pretty indifferent to them) because it was amazing.

We took some breakfast back for V, D told his boss why he wouldn't be working today as planned, and we all got ready to go just in time for checkout at 11. We hung around for a lovely walk in the grounds of the hotel with V pointing out bugs on the flowers and even picking up some lichen that they knew had fallen off the trees (very tall, with lots of what even I could recognize as Douglas firs along many other massive old trees) to let me see and touch it. It's so lovely how they carefully describe what I can't see so I can enjoy all the flora and fauna that they do.

After sharing a restorative pot of tea in the hotel bar, we went literally down the road to what had been the Strathpeffer Spa train station and is now a café, gift shop, and the Highland Museum of Childhood, all of which were great.

I am fascinated by Strathpeffer as a name, and not just because I find it impossible to say (it always goes wrong when I get to -thp-!). It finally got me to look up the word strath which I figured out from context clues would be something Gaelic to do with a river and sure enough. "Peffer" feels so German to my Minnesotan brain, and I noted Strathpeffer being described as "the most un-Scottish of Scottish towns...variously compared to Harrogate in Yorkshire and to a Bavarian mountain resort." But that's just a coincidence; Bavarian perhaps in architecture but not in name. According to what I can find about how the place got its name, it and the other "Peffer streams" ("Peffer occurs as a burn name in Inverpeffray (Crieff), and there are two Peffer burns in Athelstaneford (Haddington), also a Peffer Mill at Duddingston...") are "likely to be connected with the root seen in Welsh ‘pefr’, beautiful, fair; ‘pefrin’, radiant; ‘pefru’, to radiate."

Anyway. We enjoyed the museum, bought treats in the shop (mostly for me: fingerless gloves in a Fair Isle knitted pattern, socks with space designs on them, and a fancy bar of chocolate, but V got a teeny cute thing of some kind which they'd picked up and said "I'm turning into an old person, I'm collecting tchotchkes!" as they held it up). We had lunch at the café, with the help of an adorable spaniel who flopped right down like he'd been our dog forever, who turned out to be called Fudge and worked hard for the teeny crusts of cheesy bread I gave him and a bit of tuna mayonnaise from V's sandwich. He's well known to the café staff, who told us his name.

From there we went to Ullapool, still hopeful for the ferry, and with an hour to kill looked in the bookstore and some touristy stores where I was told how nice a £150 wool sweater would look on me, and bought some boring stuff at Boots (my eczema has been hellish lately because I've been so stressed, and also I bought my own razor now that I need one!) before sitting by the harbor watching the boats and the gulls and just having a nice time until it was time to head back to the car which we'd left in line for the ferry. Even as we were driving on to the boat I was trying not to let myself get too relieved, remembering the RVs I saw having to drive back off again yesterday with the last-minute cancellation. But it was fine.

We went up on to the deck to watch the ferry leave the harbor, had dinner (I was tempted by Calmac and cheese but I'd just had mac and cheese for lunch and thought I could use slightly more variety in my diet so went for a veggie burger and salad) and then sat in the "observation lounge" where there was increasingly less to observe as we got away from the islands near shore and also it got dark but we had relatively comfy seats and everyone was tired by then. I didn't sleep but listened to an audiobook and rested my eyes.

And like I said we got to Stornoway slightly delayed but otherwise fine, it was a very smooth crossing -- V was surprised how much so --and since we're staying in the same flat those two had last year they know the location and the layout and everything, it was the easy welcome we needed.

We hauled our stuff inside and have done various things to make ourselves feel at home: D has set up his PS5 to do his daily tasks in the couple of games he's playing, V put away the food we brought, I had a shower. D and I have also had a bit of a bottle of cherry wine I was won over by yesterday thanks to the copy on the label:

Luxury cherries from Blairgowrie make this thrilling wine a cherrylicious event.
Rich and moist, dark and silky, Little Red Riding Hood lost in the Black Forest.
Van Morrison was always going on about Sweet Cherry Wine, in an unrelated incident.

We bought it yesterday, saying we'd have it when we got to our flat that evening, and then of course we didn't. It tasted great tonight.

Went to see the cat that sleeps for a thousand years today with D and our friend A because the cat itself (enormous thing that is lit up and moves slightly and snores and purrs (more when you rub its belly!)) was made by someone they know who does big clever electronic things. It was such a clever way to tie in so many kinds of museum objects, from cheetah skeletons to ornamental vessels from Japan to Peru that had cats on them.

And then we had cake and beer/cider and a lot of good chats and it's lovely to have nice friends and the best boyfriend.

Post-restructure, my little team (which ofc got unconscionably smaller) is part of an even bigger team. Ever since, the big bosses have been saying we need an away day "to get to know each other so we can work together better."

Far be it from me to greet this with "skill issue, get gud." I know other kinds of brains from mine work better face-to-face, and I don't want to denigrate that. But... I just don't get this.

It might end up being a moot point anyway, because now they've realized how expensive it is to get us all to London for two days, the away day might not happen at all. So today we got sent this survey, asking us how to make it worthwhile.

I'm really stumped by one of the questions: "Overall, what would make the away day a success for you?"

I'm trying to be a good sport here, I'm also trying to introspect more about work for my own sake even if I don't tell anyone else what I think because it's good for me to know what I think and that hasn't felt easy to me lately.

And...as far as I can tell, success doesn't make sense to me as a characteristic of an away day.

My ceiling is "...it was only the expected amount of exhausting?"

I dug out this thing I wrote (almost exactly two years ago; is it something about this time of year? sheesh) about talkers and writers because I've been thinking about it ever since:

It starts with a vague anecdote about "a small group of leaders" gathering most of their people for two days of talking about "big changes to their organisation's mission."

The writer goes on, "These leaders were talkers. At the end of the second day of this, they were amped up and excited about the plans that had been hashed out." She contrasts these "talkers" with "writers":

The writers were on the whole befuddled and exhausted; they weren‘t sure what had been decided on, and when they tried to reflect on all that talking, it was a blur. They could feel the energy of the room was such that something exciting had happened but they didn‘t quite know what to think of it. They were uncertain if they had made themselves clear; they were uncertain of what they had wanted to make clear. They wondered if they were missing something, but they couldn‘t articulate what it was. They too sent thanks and thumbs up emojis, but they went home with a vague sense of dread.

That's me. I truly can't imagine it being anything else, without the whole organization getting the restructure it needs (rather than the one it got).

I slept well and woke up on time despite having forgotten to turn my alarm back on after turning it off for Friday. I kept D company while he returned the van (we didn't get back yesterday before the place closed, so he got to park the van on our driveway and had to give it back and collect his car this morning), and a driving adventure with him is always fun.

I took the morning off work, to make up for my long day Thursday that I couldn't claim back on Friday because I was too busy with other stuff. I was so sleepy that it was really difficult to get into work-brain for the afternoon, but I eventually got a lot done.

angelofthenorth made soup and soda bread as a starter for dinner, but we ate all the bread because it was so delicious and then it took a while for people to get hungry for the poulet au viniagre. I had mine when I got back from the gym tonight -- I biked there and back, and I had a good if short workout because it's getting dark so early and I wanted to get home before that. We're still just about in the half of the year where the days are longer than the nights and I'm determined to take advantage of it as much as I can.

And of course now being on the verge of nodding off all day, I'm not sleepy now that it's bedtime.